Floppy's Phonics
At Bexton we use the Floppy’s Phonics program to teach phonics. Floppy's Phonics is a rigorous, systematic, synthetic phonics teaching programme for early reading and writing success. The fun and familiar Biff, Chip and Kipper characters engage children fully in their phonics teaching and learning. We aim to develop each child so they are able to read with fluency and develop a love of reading. We start the program in EYFS and teach daily lessons across Key stage 1. During the lessons children use online interactive resources, workbooks and reading books.
What is phonics?
How to support your child at home.
Your child will bring home a reading folder daily. The reading books are carefully chosen to match the sounds that your child has recently learnt. It is important for the children to read these books more than once to develop their fluency and confidence in reading. They will also have a sound mat and a helpful word list to practise. The children must learn to enunciate each sound correctly so they can identify them in words. Here is an example of how to pronounce the pure sounds correctly.
Phonics: How to pronounce pure sounds | Oxford Owl - YouTube
Children have a login to the Oxford Owl online resources. Here you can find 100’s of books that you can access from home.
Terminology
Teachers use the correct terminology during phonics lessons with the children. Here is a list of terms that your child will be referring to.
Phoneme |
A single sound that can be made by one or more letters - e.g. s, k, z, oo, ph, igh |
Blend: |
Blending involves merging the sounds in a word together in order to pronounce it. For eg j-a-m blended together reads jam. |
Segment |
The opposite of blending as it means splitting a word up into individual sounds when spelling and writing. The children count the sounds at they segment them on their fingers. |
CVC |
CVC Words: this is an abbreviation used for consonant-vowel-consonant words. It describes the order of sounds. Examples are; cat, dog, kit Other similar abbreviations include: VC (Vowel Consonant) e.g on it is CCVC (Consonant, Consonant, Vowel, Consonant) e.g trap, black. CVCC (Consonant, Vowel, Consonant, Consonant) e.g. milk and fast. |
Digraph |
two letters which together make one sound e.g. ee, oa, ea, ch, ay. There are different types of digraph: Vowel digraph: a digraph in which at least one of the letters is a vowel: boat or day. Consonant digraph: two consonants which can go together: shop or thin. Split digraph (previously called magic e): two letters, which work as a pair to make one sound, but are separated within the word e.g. a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e. For example cake or pine. |
Trigraph |
three letters go together to make one sound e.g. ear, air, igh, dge, tch. |
Grapheme |
written letter or a group of letters which represent one single sound (phoneme) e.g. a, l, sh, air, ck. |
Helpful words (previously tricky words) |
words that are difficult to sound out e.g. said, the, because which don't follow phonics rules. |